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Summarizing a source

In the Frederick Lane book on electronic surveillance in the workplace, Anna Orlov found one passage in particular that presented an authoritative explanation of how surveillance software typically works. The passage contained more details than she could use, so she decided to summarize what she needed from the source.

ORIGINAL SOURCE PASSAGE

Investigator [the surveillance software] could be monitoring activity on your office computer right now, but chances are, you’d never know if it’s running or not. Eaton designed the program to be hidden in plain sight: An icon may appear in the system tray, but the various modules that make the program operate periodically change their name to make them more difficult to find. Similarly, the files that are used to hold the data that Investigator collects are given arbitrary names and dates so that they can’t be easily located. Even if you know that Investigator is running on your office computer system, you may not realize the extent to which it is actively reporting on your activities. Investigator can be configured to surreptitiously send its collected data by e-mail to your boss on a regular basis or wait until it discovers certain preset keywords (“boss,” “pornography,” “kill,” or the name of an unreleased product).

—Lane, The Naked Employee, pp. 128-29

ORLOV’S NOTES ON PASSAGE

This is a concrete example of monitoring software. But it’s too much detail. Summarize?

As Lane explains, these programs record on-screen activity in the computer in hidden directories that can later be accessed or uploaded by supervisors; the programs can even scan for keywords tailored to individual companies (128-29).

ORLOV’S SUMMARY

As Lane explains, these programs record on-screen activity in the computer in hidden directories that can later be accessed or uploaded by supervisors; the programs can even scan for keywords tailored to individual companies (128-29).

HIGHLIGHTS OF ORLOV’S SUMMARY

Orlov credits Lane by introducing her summary with a signal phrase (As Lane explains).

She condenses the original source passage in her own words and without using the language or the sentence structure of the original.

She is careful to represent Lane’s ideas fairly.

Orlov places the page numbers in parentheses after the summary to show where the ideas from the source end.

Works cited entry for source

Lane, Frederick S., III. The Naked Employee: How Technology Is Compromising Workplace Privacy. New York: Amer. Management Assn., 2003. Print.